The Death of al-Qaeda?

Strategy Page looks at the terrorist group four years in and see a decimated group that made enormous mistakes. The first being the plethora of news sources available and the ascension of Fox news. Also, the alternative media has played a huge part:

Also on the media front, the Internet was already becoming a major player. In 1998, Matt Drudge was showing that one person with a web site could break a major story. In 2004, a few bloggers were able to start the chain of events that led to Dan Rather's retirement from CBS. In 2006, bloggers are now an acknowledged player on the media battlefield. These efforts were dismissed by al Qaeda, and as a result, while al Qaeda hit its target, the effect was grossly minimized due to the fact that the "silent majority" now had tools by which they could be heard. The media created a false picture after the 1968 Tet Offensive, but was unable to do the same in Iraq.

How true. While the media was playing up the Abu Ghraib issue and the daily body count, the alternative media was writing about and linking to stories that really mattered. We took each attempt to diminish military gains and dissected it to the point that the stories were shown for what they really were, anti-Bush spin. My small group of readers link to me and in turn write their own opinion. Their readers link and so on. The fact that my twenty or thirty daily readers are not a large group, they published the info which was read by twenty more and it was disseminated.

Next:

The next mistake was underestimating American leadership. Al Qaeda assumed that the posture of the Clinton Administration (specifically, treating terrorism as a law-enforcement issue) would continue. Instead, the Bush Administration went after al Qaeda's host (the Taliban regime Afghanistan), then proceeded to go after another regime that sponsored terrorism (Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq – as indicated by documents recovered after the liberation of Iraq in 2003). Then, when the media firestorms hit, rather than fold as the Clinton Administration did after the CNN images were shown in 1993, the Bush Administration stayed the course. This eventually unnerved al Qaeda, and led to its third, and most fatal, mistake.

Bush has hung tough and spent serious political capital in doing so. It may mean a resurgence for a short time of the Democrats but it is a small price to pay to show that America will not buckle in the face of terrorism.

Lastly and most importantly:

The third mistake was to wage a campaign of terror against Iraqi civilians. This was intended to intimidate them into at least acquiescing to al Qaeda's presence, if not supporting al Qaeda at all. It didn't work. Instead, as the car bombs went off , and drew CNN headlines in the United States, al Qaeda managed to become more and more unpopular with Iraqis. Even the Arab Sunnis began to view the Americans, who had displaced them from the power they had held under Saddam, as a better option than supporting al Qaeda. Eventually, the Sunnis joined the democratic process and when that happened, al Qaeda's eventual defeat was assured with increasing Sunni participation over three elections in the space of less than a year.

The Iraqi's viewed the US military with scepticism at first, but the depth of conviction for this mission and to see the Iraqi issue through to its conclusion won over the fabled Iraqi "street". The Iraqi people do not see the US as an evil that must be removed. They see al-Qaeda that way now. The installation of Zarqawi into the al-Qaeda leadership could've been a boon to their ambitions. Because of his brutal tactics against civilians, he has destroyed them. The left has begun to try to spin a story about the US' failure to take out the unknown Zarqawi, but I see it as a non-starter to the American public.

This war is not over and will continue for at least the near term. However, al-Qaeda is on the run and in hiding with no options but to attack the weak population they should've endeared themselves to.

More here.